A Jealous Wish
by Lucillia
Summary: A year after Oopa's father is wished back to life, 13 year old Goku wishes for his own father to return to him. As they say, be careful what you wish for.
1. Learning of Jealousy

As Goku watched Oopa run to his revived father, a strange feeling stirred in his chest. He didn't quite know what it was, but it hurt. He tried to keep a happy face when he caught his grandfather's ball and said goodbye to his new friend - after all, he should be happy for him - but some of the feeling leaked through.

Oopa's father watched the boy who had helped his son depart. He had an open and smiling face, but such sad eyes.

"Does Goku have a father?" Oopa's father asked the diminutive boy sitting happily on his shoulder.

"He had a grandpa, but he died." Oopa replied.

It was then that Oopa's father realized how selfless Goku had been when he had given Oopa the wish. The boy could have taken it for himself and revived his grandfather, but he had given Oopa the wish that brought him back instead.

"If everyone was half as giving as Goku, the world would be a much better place." Oopa's father said, watching the spot of sky that Goku had departed from. "We can only hope to follow his example."

"I'll do my best father." Oopa said smiling as he thought of his friend.

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When Goku got back to the others, he asked Master Roshi about the strange feeling he had while watching Oopa and his father. Apparently it was called Jealousy, and he felt that way because he wanted a father too. He had a year before the Dragon Balls could be used though. He would use that time to train until it was time to search once more.


	2. The Wish Is Made

Gathering the Dragon Balls had been quite easy this time. Bulma had handed Goku the Dragon Ball locator without a fuss and told him that she couldn't come along this time because she had to study for her college midterm. The seventeen year old girl had been on a self paced study program the last few years, but had finally decided to go back to traditional schooling and was less than a year from her first degree with a Major in Engineering and a Minor in Chemistry. She had told him that she would like to see what happened when he made his wish though. All of his friends had agreed to take a break from what they were doing the day he made his wish so they all could meet his father. It was agreed that the wish making would take place on the island where Muten Roshi was training Krillin and Yamcha.

Going as fast as he could - having been allowed to use Kinto'un for this particular task - it had taken him a little less than a week to gather all seven Dragon Balls. He only had to chase the would-be Emperor Pilaf away from a couple of them this time, and didn't have to fight an army for any of the rest. On the day Goku had been waiting a year for, he flew to the island that he and Krillin had trained on for the Tenkaichi Budokai with Bulma following behind in a Capsule Jet.

Goku, Krillin, Yamcha, Master Roshi, Bulma, Puar, and Oolong gathered around the glowing balls that Goku had dumped out of his bag, looking at them with some awe.

Goku stepped forward and called for Shenron to come forth, and he did in an amazing display of light and darkness before asking him to make his wish.

"I wish for my father to come back to me!" Goku yelled.

"It shall be done." Shenron said before vanishing.

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In the next world, Bardock stood before King Yemma's desk wondering why he wasn't in Hell.

"Someone has wished you back to life, and I'll let you go on one condition." King Yemma said.

"Name it." Bardock said, not believing his luck.

"The condition is that you don't kill off the population of the Planet Earth, or any other planet for that matter." King Yemma said knowing that with Saiyans, entirely banning killing would be impossible.

"Agreed." Bardock said, hardly able to wait to find his son so he could help him defeat Freeza.

"Done." King Yemma said, and an instant later Bardock found himself in an unfamiliar environment that he didn't get a good look at because something furry had latched itself onto his face.


	3. First Sighting of the Father

The instant the man appeared, Goku knew it was his Daddy. He had a father, just like Oopa. Now he wouldn't have to feel jealous anymore, and it wouldn't hurt. With a joyful cry, Goku launched himself at his father and latched onto the first thing he grabbed. They were going to have so much fun together. Maybe his father could help him train for the next Tenkaichi Budokai. He only had two years left before it took place.

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Bulma looked at the man who stood in the place that Shenron had been only seconds before. She had only gotten the impression of Goku's hair because the instant after the man had appeared, Goku - who was wearing a spotty and mud covered animal skin of some sort - had latched onto the man's face as he had done to his grandfather Gohan at the Fortuneteller Baba's the year before.

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Yamcha looked at the man that had appeared the moment the Great Dragon had disappeared. He'd gotten a brief look at a pair of rather cold eyes and a rather formidable looking scar before they were covered by an excited Goku. While he was happy that Goku was happy, he began to wonder if the wish Goku had made was such a good idea. After all, where had the man been for the last thirteen years?

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Krillin watched as Goku latched himself onto his father's head. He wondered why his friend would be so happy to see someone who had abandoned him as a baby. Come to think of it, if the man was anything like Goku, he probably hadn't meant to abandon him. Knowing Goku, it was quite likely that the man had gone fishing or something and forgotten that he had brought his kid along. If the man was anything like Goku, he'd hate to see what Goku's mother looked like.

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Muten Roshi stared at the man - if that was what he was - in front of him in fear and awe. An incredible amount of power seemed to roll off of him in waves. It was more power than he had seen in his entire life. The man was built like a warrior. It was no wonder that Goku was as powerful as he was at such a young age.

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Puar and Oolong began to hightail it out of there the instant they got half a look at what had arrived after Goku had made his wish. Goku had brought something to Earth that was far more dangerous than a hundred nuclear warheads. He had brought a Saiyan. More importantly, he brought a full grown Saiyan in peak physical condition that most likely wasn't brain damaged. They knew that Goku hadn't done what he did out of malice. If they had been thinking, they probably could've warned everyone of the danger Goku's wish had presented. But they had managed to convince themselves that Goku wasn't what they thought he was. What self respecting Saiyan would behave the way that boy did? A short and fast conversation revealed that neither of the ships that had brought them to Earth as toddlers were in working condition. Maybe if they hid in a cave for a couple of years...

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Bardock swiftly grabbed the furry thing and tore it off of his face before throwing it to the ground. When he got his first unobstructed look at his surroundings, he saw a group of rather shocked and angry people standing in front of him. Obviously it had been a member of this small group that had wished him back.

"Well?" Bardock asked.

"Well, what?" the blue haired female snapped back, clearly looking as if she wanted to say more to him and probably call him a few choice things as well. There were tears welling up in her eyes.

"Which one of you wished me back?" Bardock said, choosing to ignore the terminally stupid woman in favor of getting answers.

"Goku did." a short bald adolescent with his arms crossed in front of him practically growled.

"Which one of you is Goku?" Bardock asked.

"Your son, the one you just threw on the ground like a piece of garbage." A tall, dark haired boy said angrily.

Bardock looked down at his feet where the furry creature had landed. It was a boy who had most likely only just reached his teens. He was wearing a filthy animal pelt. He rolled the unconscious child over with his boot. The boy looked just like he had at that age, but with his mate's coloring. The kid had a few broken bones, nothing a few hours in a regeneration tank couldn't fix.

"Kakarot, why?" he said, mostly to himself.

"Because he went his entire life without his father, and wanted him to be around." an old man wearing some sort of shell on his back said sadly.


	4. The Doctors View of Things

Doctor Yakamura couldn't believe his eyes when he saw the child in the back seat of the car. He'd seen the boy here once before, when his friend Krillin had gotten into some sort of accident that had somehow involved a boulder. He couldn't believe his ears when he heard the explanation for the boy's condition that the blue haired girl - who had brought him - had choked out through her tears. The child's father had shown up out of the blue thirteen years after abandoning him, and had beaten the crap out of the boy when he had tried to give him a hug.

While he raced alongside the gurney that the child - whose name was Son Goku - had been laid on, he wondered how someone could be so cruel as to hurt the small, bright, and cheerful boy that had been willing to sit for hours making funny faces and telling funny stories to distract his friend from the pain he was in. Once the gurney had gotten to Trauma, he told one of the nurses that had accompanied it to call the police and tell them to find the boy's father. Justice for what the man had done to his child couldn't come swift enough if he had anything to say about it.

Several X-rays revealed that the child had had his left arm broken in two places, had three broken ribs and his right wrist was broken. Fortunately, none of the ribs had punctured anything vital and he didn't appear to have any serious head trauma though there were signs of an old injury. Not knowing the child's medical history, namely if he had allergies to any medication, the doctor decided not to take the risk of destablizing his patient. Wincing because he knew it was going to hurt the boy, he gently stripped him out of the filthy animal pelt he was wearing. A quick glance at his back as he pulled off the garment revealed that what he thought was a fake tail was actually real. One of the patient's parents was quite likely one of the animal people whose ancestors had suddenly showed up out of nowhere a few centuries back. While they generally kept to their own kind when it came to mating, there had been a few stories over the years. It was a good thing he hadn't given the boy any painkillers, he had lost a patient that had resembled a red fox by doing just that a few years ago.

Swiftly cutting his musings short, the doctor hurled the garment into the trash bin and set to the grim task of setting the bones in the child's arm. It was a mercy that he was unconscious, he didn't think he would be able to bear hearing the child scream. After he got the first break set - and right when he was about to splint it - someone walked into the room. A quick glance out of the corner of his eye told him that it wasn't a doctor.

He looked up at the man who had entered. The first thing he took in was the strangely dressed man's extremely muscular build. Heightwise, the man was somewhere between average height and tall. A scar on the man's left cheek marred an otherwise handsome face. The cold eyes that were so black that he couldn't tell the difference between the pupil and the iris added an air of arrogance to the said face. It was the hair that gave him a clue about why the man was here; it stuck up in exactly the same pattern as that of the boy lying unconscious in front of him. He had a feeling that the brown furry thing wrapped around the man's waist wasn't a fashion accessory.

"Are you the father?" he asked after getting over the shock of having a musclebound stranger barge into the Trauma room.

"Yes." the man said in a flat, emotionless tone.

The man's tone of voice startled him. If it had been his child on the table, he wouldn't have been so cold. He would've been panicking and begging to know what was wrong with his child. But, considering where the blue haired girl said his patient had gotten his injuries, he probably shouldn't have been surprised.

The blue haired girl hadn't known who the patient's legal guardian was after a few questions had revealed that it wasn't the Turtle Hermit (who had forgotten to fill out the necessary paperwork), and the boy - being unconscious and underage - couldn't fill out any treatment consent forms. It would be the father - who had been gone for thirteen years and had chosen today of all days to waltz back into his son's life and start destroying it - who would have to approve his child's treatment. He calmed himself as best as he could before speaking. It wouldn't do to sound angry and judgmental when requesting parental consent from the man who had beaten the ever-loving crap out of his own child for hugging him. Based on the man's apparent attitude, it was likely that he would end up sparking a confrontation that would end up with himself injured and further harm done to the boy.

"The patient's left arm is broken in two places, he has three broken ribs, and his right wrist is broken as well. I would like to keep him here a couple of days for observation to make sure he's stabilized and beginning to heal." He said.

He carefully avoided mentioning what he planned on doing when those days were up, as he sure as hell wasn't going to release the boy into the man's custody when it was time for him to be discharged. Once he was done here, he was personally going to call the children's charity that the Briefs family ran on the mainland and do everything he could to get them to come out here as fast as possible. Hopefully, the boy would get a new home before the man who had dared to call himself his father even knew what had happened. He'd have some choice words with the Turtle Hermit who had been teaching him and his friend last year as well. Who lets a child run around in a dirty, flea ridden, untreated and half rotting animal skin?

"Acceptable." the man said before making himself at home in the Trauma room. All requests that he leave were summarily ignored.

Knowing there was nothing he could do until the island's police force of three arrived to back up the hospital's elderly security guard - who had called them at his request - he did his level best to ignore the man and get back to treating his patient. As he splinted the first fracture, the child stirred and whimpered. It looked like the child would be conscious before he finished setting all of the broken bones.

"Nurse, get the sedatives for the special patients." He ordered. Hopefully the child would be so out of it when he woke up, that he wouldn't notice the pain.

He carefully measured out the dose in a syringe according to the weight charts for a monkey, praying all the while that he hadn't misguessed the species of the boy's nonhuman ancestor, who was looking to be a grandparent rather than a parent if the rather twitchy furry thing wrapped around the father's waist was any indicator. He had learned his lesson about applying human standards to those who weren't entirely human the day he lost Mr. Kitsune. He hoped that he wasn't overcompensating considering the fact that the boy was quite likely three quarters human.

He was about to administer the sedatives when the syringe was snatched out of his hand.

"What's in this?" the man asked, peering closely at its contents.

"It's a sedative to calm the patient before he wakes up." he replied, amazed that the man was showing even the slightest bit of concern.

"What's in this?" the man asked again.

"I told you, it's a sedative." he replied.

"You're not giving it to him." the man said as he crushed the syringe underfoot, carefully avoiding the needle. "In fact, I don't want you anywhere near him."

The last thing he saw was a wall coming at him at an impossible speed. The thought that he carried with him to the other world was:

_How could something so sweet and innocent come from something so evil?_


	5. Bardock's view of things

While he tried to process the answer the old man had given him, Bardock watched as the group cautiously braved their way towards him and rather gently gathered up his son. The blue haired female pulled something that looked like an oversized vitamin pill with a button on the end out of her pocket, pressed the button, and threw it. A wheeled conveyance of some sort appeared where the item had landed. The other members of the group carefully carried the boy over to the vehicle, and very gently laid him down on the short upholstered bench toward what he presumed was the rear of the vehicle. The blue haired woman climbed onto the forward bench behind an extra wheel that was placed at an odd angle. With a squealing of tires and a crunching of gravel the vehicle began to make its way toward some unknown destination. Almost idly, he took to the air and followed it.

_Why would Kakarot wish for him to be there merely because he wasn't?_ Bardock wondered as he followed the vehicle to a dome shaped building that had a large red cross painted on the front.

The vehicle stopped in front of a door with unfamiliar writing on it, and a bunch of people - a couple of whom wore the white coats common throughout the galaxy amongst scientists and doctors - rushed from the building. The people promptly started fussing over his son, carefully placing him on some sort of wheeled bed before carting him inside the building. The creatures on this planet were truly pathetic if they fussed that much over such minor injuries. On Vegeta, one of Kakarot's teammates would've simply dragged the boy to the med-center and tossed him into a regen tank. A few hours later, the child would be bouncing out eager to get back to work, just like he and Raditz had at that age.

Kakarot had been one hell of a surprise. He and his mate had decided to stop trying to have more children after Raditz's next two siblings had been miscarried, and for about a decade that was just what they had done. Raditz had been twelve when Bardock learned that his mate was pregnant once more. Neither of them had expected the pregnancy to last, and after every mission Bardock expected to hear that his mate had yet again miscarried. Instead, the child had been born alive about a month earlier than he was expected. Once it became clear that he would survive, the small and practically powerless infant had been sent to clear out a planet full of weaklings in the hope that it would strengthen him. He had clearly failed in his task. Watching the Earthlings treat him like some sort of well loved pet made it apparent that he had been living off of them instead of killing them as he was supposed to. While that was an admirable survival technique amongst some species, it was completly unacceptable for a Saiyan.

Bardock ceased his musings, landed in front of the building the vehicle had stopped at and entered it through the door through which his son had been taken. He would see that his son was tended to, and then leave until the child was ready to join him. Following the rather pugnant scent of the boy's attire, he swiftly found where his son was being treated. It was there that he got an unpleasant surprise. Rather than having been placed in the local equivalent of a regen tank that he had figured the med-center he was in would have (this conjecture had been based on the level of technology that would be necessary to be able to create a small object that could turn into a vehicle large enough to fit several people) one of the white coated people that had brought his son in was setting the bones in the unconscious boy's left arm by hand while a female in a loose-fitting and brightly patterned outfit prepared something off to the side.

The man looked up at him in surprise.

"Are you the father?" The doctor asked after recovering his composure.

"Yes." he replied.

"The patient's left arm is broken in two places, he has three broken ribs, and his right wrist is broken as well. I would like to keep him here a few days for observation to make sure he's stabilized and beginning to heal." the doctor said.

Obviously - considering the lack of regen tanks - they didn't have the technology to be able to immediately tell if his son was getting better.

"Acceptable." he said before leaning against the nearest wall so he could supervise the treatment his son was getting. While Saiyans were apparently outwardly similar to the inhabitants of Earth, it was a near certainty that there would be a great deal of internal differences. He would stand by to make sure the doctor didn't make some sort of mistake that permanently damaged or killed his son while he set the boy's broken bones. He naturally ignored the weakling's whining that he leave.

After realizing the futility of his efforts, the doctor shut up and got back to work. It was amazing to see how fast the Earth creature's emotions shifted. Every time the doctor even glanced up at him, he got angry and annoyed. When he shifted his attention to his patient, he would become sad and concerned. When his son began to regain consciousness and whimpered in pain, so many emotions flickered over the doctor's face at once that it was almost impossible to tell what the man had been feeling.

"Nurse, get the sedatives for the special patients." the doctor said after Kakarot whimpered a second time.

_Special patients? Has this doctor treated offworlders before? If he has, why didn't he have any regen tanks? _Bardock wondered as he watched the doctor consult some sort of chart that he had quickly pulled out of a binder, and prepare the medication.

The doctor's mutterings of hoping that he'd gotten the right species alarmed him. Taking drugs meant for another species was often a very quick and easy way to die, even for the more resiliant of species. Saiyans could survive the effects of just about any beating that didn't kill them before it was over, but an overdose or a dose of the wrong drug could easily be fatal. Before Fasha had joined the team, he had lost a team member that had been dumb enough to try getting high on the pharmecuticals he had salvaged from a planet they had cleared out. One quick prick of the needle, and he was gone.

He quickly grabbed the incompetent doctor's arm before the man could inject his son with the unknown substance.

"What's in this?" he asked, looking closely at it's contents. Whatever it was, it was completely clear, and that told him nothing.

"It's a sedative to calm the patient before he wakes up." the doctor said.

Since the doctor didn't clarify his statement, he would have to assume that he either didn't know the substance's chemical components or had assumed that further clarification of its contents would go over his head. He wasn't an idiot, far from it in fact. While on downtime between missions and during the flights that were too short to bother sleeping, but long enough to get extremely boring he studied biology and chemistry. He believed that his studies may have been a byproduct of his spending so much time in the med-center. A sedative - even one for a species that was biologically similar to a Saiyan - could contain any number of chemicals that could negatively impact his son's health if it didn't kill him outright.

"What's in this?" he asked again, demanding further clarification.

"I told you, it's a sedative." the doctor replied.

"You're not giving it to him." he said as he dropped the syringe containing the sedative and crushed the offending object beneath his boot. "In fact, I don't want you anywhere near him."

He threw the incompetent doctor into a wall, feeling no remorse as he did so. It was a dead certainty that the man would have killed someone through his stupidity in the future if he hadn't done so already. An incompetent doctor is often worse than no doctor at all, and had no value in the universe. He ignored the screaming nurse as he gathered up his son and as many of the medical supplies he as he could carry onehanded and left to tend to the boy's injuries himself.


	6. He's Not A Pet

Bardock sat in the cave he had found and finished splinting all of his son's breaks with the flimsy Earth materials he had gathered from the medical center when he had taken his son out of the hands of that incompetent, and now dead doctor. He felt a small amount of pride in the fact that after his son became fully conscious, he didn't shame himself by screaming while he tended to his wounds.

_The boy is rather weak. I barely even threw him and he broke at least seven bones. How is he going to become the man I saw defeat Freeza in my visions of the future?_ he thought as he watched his son who had mercifully fallen asleep after his arms had been splinted and his ribs tightly bound.

While the thought of purging another planet after what Frieza had done to Vegeta sickened him, he didn't know any other way to train a Saiyan as weak as his son without the use of a regen tank. This planet was supposed to have been purged already anyway. The fact remained that the boy hadn't done his job, and if someone came to check up on him he would be severely punished if not killed outright. He didn't want his son to be killed by Frieza's minions before he was ready.

_No, _he thought, _you saw in the visions that nobody would come until after he was grown. What's bothering you about this is that he's been living off these humans as some kind of pet. You saw how they coddled him, and how the female stroked his hair as they put him in the vehicle. This has nothing to do with his assignment for Frieza, you want to make him destroy them so he can regain his Saiyan pride._

As he sat watching his son, wondering what kind of life the boy had led in the thirteen plus years since he died, he suddenly remembered the comment the doctor had made about "Special Patients". Perhaps these creatures did have regen tanks and withheld such treatment for his son for an unknown reason. He would have to go and talk to the people that had kept his son to find out.

Knowing that it would be okay to leave the boy alone for a few hours since the cave he had selected was too high up a mountainside for almost all kinds of land predators to reach and the opening too narrow for any large flying predators, Bardock set out for the island where the people who had kept his son lived.

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Muten Roshi the Turtle Hermit sat watching the night sky, worried about his student. Hours earlier, he had learned that the doctor who had been treating Goku's injuries had been killed by his father. The poor boy who had been without his family for so long had made a desperate wish, and the results had been dangerous and highly unexpected. The child had been hoping for someone who was like Gohan when he had made that wish, instead he had gotten a monster. Come to think of it, he should have expected this from Gohan's earliest letters about the boy.

Suddenly, a streak appeared over the horizon. Soon it was apparent that said streak was a person who was rapidly flying towards him.

_Great, Tsuru Senin is the last thing I wanted to deal with today on top of everything else_. He thought.

The streak came closer and proved itself to be the only person other than the master of the Crane School and his students that the Turtle Hermit had seen fly, Goku's father. The man landed in front of him.

"What do you want?" he asked as he took a defensive stance, knowing it was futile.

"I wish to talk to you and your companions about my son." the man said.

"Come inside then." he said, before turning to enter his house, silently praying to every deity that he, his students, Lunch, and Bulma who had stayed out of worry for her friend would survive the "conversation".

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Bardock looked down at the few mouthfuls of food that had been set before him. He had arrived in time for the humans' evening meal, and his host had decided to invite him to the table. Looking around, he noticed that the same amount of food was on everyone else's plates. How was his son so healthy if this was all he got to eat at each meal?

Looking at the angry faces of the others at the table, and the way they kept looking back and forth between him and the plate, he realized that they understood Saiyan eating habits and that this had been a deliberate slight.

"If I may ask, how did my son become your pet?" he said, looking at the most senior member of the group, getting straight to what had been gnawing at him the most.

"Pet?!" the bald, bearded, man yelled in surprise after he quit choking on his drink. "Goku's not a pet, he's my student."

"Student?" he asked. Apparently the boy possessed a modicum of pride.

"Yes, he came to me almost two years ago seeking training in the Martial Arts." the old man said. "In fact the man who had found and adopted him was a former student of mine as well."

"If I may ask, where have you been for the last thirteen years?" The old man said, trying and failing to keep an accusing look off of his face.

"Dead." he replied.

"Oh. That explains alot..." the old man said. The looks everyone else around the table gave him seemed to state that he had clearly deserved it.

He turned to the blue haired female that had transported his son to the medical center where that incompetent doctor had worked.

"Why wasn't my son put into a regen tank?" he asked.

"What's a regen tank?" the female, who was either in late adolescence or early adulthood asked.

That answered his question. Apparently the appellation "Special Patient" meant something else. He spent several minutes explaining what a regen tank was to the female after taking the two seconds necessary for the consumption of the food that had been set before him. He expected that his explanation would take only a few seconds, but the female had asked several highly intelligent questions about the technical aspects of the device.

He almost regretted asking what his son had been doing while he was dead when he had been stuck sitting there for hours - half starved - listening to everyone tell him about how his son who was quite obviously brain damaged lived alone in the mountains for years, went on three quests to gather some magic wishing balls and participated in a Martial Arts tournament. Apparently, from the way these people spoke, his son's actions were something they believed he should be proud of.

He gathered a couple of things from their story, 1) he would have to find a way to get off-planet with the boy and find a competent doctor as soon as possible to fix the brain damage, and 2) when he gave the boy "The Talk" (which he had left to his mate to give to Raditz, and would have had her give it to Kakarot if she hadn't died), he was really really going to have his work cut out for him.

When he got back to the cave where he had left his son, he was sleeping peacefully despite the fact that some sort of small scaly-tailed mammal was chewing on his ear.


	7. Capsule House

Goku awoke to the sound of a startled squeak and the sound of something living smacking into a rock. When he opened his eyes, the first thing he saw were the broken remains of a rather large rat. The second thing he saw was the being that had killed the rat. The same being that had thrown him so hard that he still hurt all over. His father.

This was the first time he had gotten a good look at the father he had waited an entire year to see. He didn't look very nice. He felt his tail bristling as the man came closer.

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Bardock watched as his own child backed away from him in fear. This was not how a Saiyan child was supposed to act. The boy had lived amongst these humans for far too long, and their weak habits had brushed off on him. He needed to find a way to get them off planet soon so he could get his son out of their influence and teach him how to be a proper Saiyan.

Space itself would pose many dangers though, amongst which were Frieza's men whom he would have to avoid. Then there were those Dragonball things. As far as he knew, this was the only planet that had them. He had never encountered any before, and never heard of anyone else encountering them either. If they could bring him back from the dead, they could bring others. It was possible that he could use them to restore the Saiyan race.

If what he heard was accurate though, he would have to wait another year before they could be used.

Moving slowly to show that he wasn't a threat, he eventually got close enough to his son to pick him up. Kakarot's blue haired friend had given him something called a capsule house when she had learned that he had left him in a cave. Knowing from personal experience that a cave wasn't the best place to recover from serious injuries, he had accepted the item that he'd been informed turned into a reasonably sized dwelling complete with kitchen and bathing facilities.

After finding a clearing in a forest that looked to contain an adequate number of animals to feed a recovering Saiyan, he set his son down at the edge of a clearing and followed the instructions the blue haired human had given him. Within seconds the clearing was filled with a medium sized dome shaped house. He then picked his son up and carried him inside where he set him down in one of the rooms that had been furnished for sleeping.

A self guided tour of the house revealed that it had two sleeping rooms, a room that contained a shower a sink and a basin of water that would swirl around and go down a drain when a lever was pulled down that was supplied by a tank and some sort of water collector that he would examine further later, a sitting room with a primitive entertainment center, a kitchen with a pantry stocked with canned and dried goods and a freezer stocked with frozen fruits vegetables and meat, and a covered generator for electricity. All in all the place wasn't bad. He would have to go hunting later since there was only enough food for maybe two meals, three at the most.

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Back at Muten Roshi's house, Goku's friends were wrapping their heads around the fact that Goku was an alien. Muten Roshi thought his former student had either been drunk or high when he had written to tell him how he had found a vicious baby with a tail near a space ship. Krillin realized that he had been unable to beat Goku because his friend had simply been born on an entirely different level, and would continue to rise preventing him from defeating him in the future. Yamcha mentally raised the tally of aliens he was friends with to two as Puar had confessed to being one years earlier. Bulma was wailing over the number of opportunities to study him that she had missed.

Lunch just smiled vapidly and made everyone a midnight snack. She had known for a long time that Goku wasn't human. There was no way in hell that a child that ate as much as Goku did could be.


	8. Breakfast

When Goku woke up again, he found himself on a bed. He briefly wondered what had awakened him until he smelled the cooked meat and fried..._apples?_ He tried to get up to investigate, but found he couldn't since he still hurt everywhere. It didn't matter though, because the food smell started getting closer.

Soon, he heard the door to the room he was in open and he looked up to see his father enter carrying a tray that was heaped with food.

Up until that moment, it was as if he didn't realize how hungry he was. When he did, he noticed that he was absolutely starving. As soon as his father set the tray near him, he started to reach out to devour the food only to discover that it was too painful to do so. He started whining like the fox that would sometimes come up to him in search of food before he left with Bulma. He was hungry, but he couldn't eat.

His father sighed, picked up some of the food, and fed it to him like Grandpa Gohan did when he was little.

His eyes widened in surprise at the first bite. Bulma had let him cook once when they were looking for Dragon Balls, and had yelled at him for putting sugar and that cinnamon stuff in the meat like his father had just done. He didn't understand why, since it was tasty. The salted and spiced fried apples were delicious as well.

All too soon, the food was gone and he was sleepy again.

&!&!&

Bardock watched his son sleep once more. It looked like he would have to feed Kakarot for a while since his broken arm and his broken wrist prevented him from feeding himself.

He'd gotten up early and hadn't really felt like hunting, so he had decided to closely examine the food stores and carefully sample everything to make sure that none of it was poisonous. It was fiendishly difficult - and damn near impossible when it came to ingestion - to poison a Saiyan, but sometimes you never could tell. And, with his son in the weakened state that he was in...

Fortunately for him and his son, his mother had taught him how to cook things beyond the standard "Mission Roast" and shown him how to improvise in the kitchen.

Two of the spices in the cabinet stood out to him, as when they were mixed they tasted pretty damn close to the succulent leaves that were wrapped around balls of meat which was one of his favorite breakfast foods.

After grabbing a package of ground meat from the freezer, he had quick thawed it with a ki flash and mixed it with the spices before shaping it into balls. While the meat was cooking, he grabbed all of the sweet red fruits and began slicing them into rings to make a small side dish. After he fried the slices, he salted them and added some of the more fiery spices to counter their sweet flavor.

Once the small meal was finished cooking, he quickly ate his share and put his son's portion on a tray. When he set the food down beside the child, it quickly became obvious that the boy wasn't able to feed himself, and he was forced to feed him.

Kakarot fell asleep almost the instant he was done eating. That was a good sign, as it meant his body was beginning to recover.

_A white pod crashed into a field. Someone with his mate's hair and climbed out and swiftly moved away. Almost the instant the person was clear of the pod, it exploded._

_The stranger who turned out to be male moved towards him._

_"I got your message Father." the muscular young man who towered over him like his father-in-law used to said._

Strange. He could have sworn that he'd had a vision of his sons fighting and Raditz dying before he himself died when Vegeta was destroyed by Frieza. As for his message...

After the Colds had forbidden using the Scouter Net for personal communication, they had found a way around this by masking such communications as misdirected supply or information requests, or maintenance orders amongst other things. A general announcement about a pod design flaw he'd once noticed with a carefully hidden message that contained a set of coordinates should get his son's attention and make it less suspicious when his pod blows up on arrival.

Kakarot's pod should be on this planet somewhere, and if the communications equipment was still in working order...


	9. Clandestine Messages

Raditz frowned as he reread the General Service Announcement about a glitch in the space pods' design and the steps that should be taken to prevent a catastrophic explosion upon landing. It was impossible. It was impossible, yet there it was. Hidden amongst some random code that had something to do with the ships and bases that the message was to be sent to or something like that was his father's service number and the coordinates for an out of the way world. The impossibility of this had to do in the fact that his father had died when Vegeta had exploded.

Not knowing what to do, Raditz showed the message to Nappa. Nappa's eyebrows shot up his his forehead towards his non-existent hairline when he saw what Raditz had seen. Nappa's reaction had confirmed that Raditz hadn't just been imagining things. This was apparently real. But, why? Why now?

"There's also a link to an audio file." Nappa said quietly as he pointed to a string of meaningless numbers.

With his heart in his throat, Raditz accessed the audio file that Nappa had indicated. To anyone else it would have just been static, but to a Low Class Saiyan who had learned a variety of ways to get around the Colds' personal communications ban during his childhood...

Raditz turned to Nappa.

"If you hear that I've died..." Raditz signed with a series of discreet twitches of his tail.

"Understood." Nappa replied with a twitch of his own tail.

&!&!&

"Where is Raditz going?" Prince Vegeta asked Nappa as he watched Raditz's pod depart.

"To retrieve his brother's corpse." Nappa replied aloud for the benefit of eavesdroppers as he signed "To pick up a survivor".

He barely dared to hope. Bardock had been something of a legend amongst the lower classes. Tales of his exploits had even reached the Royal Court, and it had been for this reason that Bardock's son had been admitted into the Royal Guard. Nappa had been almost honored to serve alongside Bardock's son, up until he realized that the boy definitely was no Bardock, quite far from it in fact.

There had been rumors that Bardock had gone up against Freeza himself shortly before Vegeta was destroyed, and he was willing to believe them. Perhaps, if Bardock were still alive he would be willing to face off against Freeza once more, and the monster's tyranny would be ended. Before Freeza and his father had shown up, Saiyans had had honor as well as pride.

&!&!&

As Bardock prepared a light lunch that consisted of a couple gallons of that odd red soup which he'd diluted to an appropriate consistency with some bright orange fruit juice, and sweetened to an acceptable level before adding a dash of a fiery liquid spice that the universal translator told him was "Tabasco" sauce when he'd attempted to read the label - meaning that the thing had finally had enough time to adjust to the written language -, ki roasted tan feline, and slices of the amazingly sour yellow fruit that had been properly sweetened and salted, something told him that Raditz was on his way as he had foreseen.

Smiling, he made his way to his son's room with the improvised meal which Kakarot was apparently glad to receive.


	10. The Kidnapping of Son Goku

Bulma made a face as she watched Goku eat his meal on the monitor. That had to be one of the strangest meals she had ever seen anyone eat. She was amazed that the poor boy didn't puke when his father fed it to him, but then again the kid would eat anything that was set in front of him if he were told it was food.

Besides the horrible meals, such as that one of nearly a month's worth of tomato soup mixed with orange juice, half a bag of sugar, and a bottle of Tabasco sauce with a side of Mountain Lion steak, and several lemons with sugar and salt dumped on them for dessert, Goku's father hadn't abused the boy any further, but she would continue to watch the house through the home security system that she'd hacked just in case.

Neither Goku nor his father who had vanished for a while before returning with the Mountain Lion which he'd skinned, cleaned, and cooked using one of those energy blasts that Muten Roshi, Krillin, and Goku used as an attack had done very much that day. Goku had spent most of the day sleeping, and his father, whose name was Bardock had spent most of the day cooking.

While everything seemed peaceful and almost idyllic now, things could change in an instant. Hopefully, the team of mercenaries she'd hired would manage to get Goku out of there before anything happened. Right now, they were on standby, waiting for Goku's father to leave once more.

As Goku, who had just finished his meal, lay back, getting ready to go back to sleep, Bardock announced that his older brother was coming, and would be here in about six months or so.

At first, she was surprised that Goku had an older brother. While Bardock was handsome in a roguish way, he was also a child abusing asshole. What kind of woman would willingly bear his offspring, much less sleep with him twice?

She hadn't missed the fact that the man had called his son a weakling, and had been muttering to himself about using the boy to defeat someone or something called Freeza. Apparently, the boy's supposed future role in this Freeza's defeat was the reason Bardock was helping his son recover.

Eventually, after briefly going outside to take a leak against a tree which was probably some sort of Saiyan territory marking thing, washing his hands in the bathroom sink upon his return, and watching t.v. for a couple of hours, Goku's father settled down to sleep. She had been tempted to send the mercenary team in then, but she didn't know if Bardock was as sound a sleeper as Goku. She didn't want to unnecessarily risk the lives of the mercenaries she'd hired, as Bardock had shown that he could kill an ordinary human being just as easily as she could crush a bug when he had killed the doctor at the island hospital.

After several tense hours as she wavered over her decision whether or not to risk sending in the mercenaries and potentially put Goku's father on guard for a future attempt if this one failed, Bardock awoke and left the house. Five minutes after she gave the order, the mercenaries had their target and were in the air. Goku would be back at her parents' house and safe soon.

&!&!&!&

Bardock was whistling a tune that had been rather popular on Vegeta shortly before its destruction as he carried the brace of creatures that the nature documentary he'd watched last night had called Velociraptors home. He'd left one of the creatures alive in order to have some fresh meat later, and it had tried to bite him the entire trip back, but he'd held the creature in a headlock that prevented it from doing so.

After staking the still living Velociraptor out on the lawn for later and dropping its three dead companions off in the living-room so he could prepare them for lunch, he went to his son's bedroom to check on him.

Kakarot was gone.

The boy was still too injured to be up and about on his own, and there were several foreign scents in the house that he recognized as belonging to human males. This meant that someone had taken his son while he had been out hunting.

They would pay. And, he was going to take great care in making their deaths slow and painful.

After fixing their scents in his memory, he began searching. The scents stopped at the landing site of some sort of flying vehicle. Knowing that he was an hour behind his son's kidnappers, he took to the air, following the faint and diffuse scent of the fuel that powered their vehicle.


	11. In Transit

At the moment, Bardock felt like destroying everything around him. After following the trail that his son's captors had taken for a good long while, he had reached a dead end. The vehicle that the soon to be dead kidnappers were flying had gone into more populated airspace and the faint and almost non-existent scent of fuel that he'd been following had turned into an overpowering stench that would lead him in circles should he try to follow it.

Directly below him lay a town that was surrounded by outlying farms for miles in every direction until civilization gave way to the wild mountain forests that surrounded the community. Only a small gossamer net of roads connected this small outpost of civilization to the rest of society. In the town, few people had bothered to look up from their daily business, and those who did were usually children who were promptly disbelieved as they pointed to the sky and demanded that the adults that surrounded them look up because a man was flying overhead.

Dropping to the ground, he made his way to what seemed to be a communal gathering place. The food it contained tempted him greatly as flying burned a great deal of energy but he held back because making a spectacle of himself by grabbing and eating everything in sight would make the locals be less inclined to answer the questions he planned to ask. Though it pained him to say it, he would have to get food later.

Entering the marketplace, he started to ask questions that would help him find out who would take his son, why, and where they would be likely to go now that they had him. Asking would quite likely be futile but, the locals would know more about their planet's society and might be able to give him a clue as to where to start his search by mentioning something he would never have thought of due to the stark differences between their cultures.

Fortunately, there was only one planet to search. Things could have been infinitely more difficult had it been otherwise.

* * *

Raditz sighed as he hit the button that would send him into stasis. He hated being chilled down. There was no telling when or, considering the failure rate, even if he would wake up but, for trips that were more than a few days in length, it was pretty much the only way to survive in such close quarters without going completely mad from the boredom and isolation. That, and if he had tried to stay awake for the next six months, the ship's air and waste recycling systems would up and die on him well before he starved to death since such ships were only stocked with about a month's worth of emergency ration pills. That was if the resulting stench from his own wastes didn't kill him first.

As he sat contemplating the number of ways that staying awake for the entire six-month journey to where his father had been hiding would be hell, there was a brilliant flash, and all went still within the ship. Unheard by anyone including the now frozen Raditz, a small electronic chime indicated that the transition into stasis had been successful.

* * *

Goku sighed once again as his stomach growled ferociously demanding food. He'd already eaten everything that the nice people who said that they were taking him to a friend had, and they couldn't stop for more because they had to hurry to wherever they were going. He wondered what friend they were taking him to, and hoped that it wasn't a trick. The men had all seemed nice even though they looked unhappy for some strange reason, and he didn't want to have to hurt them.

* * *

The mercenary who went by the name of "Mitch" watched the boy he'd been paid to retrieve nervously. The boy that they'd been tasked with retrieving and bringing to Capsule Corp matched the description of the kid that had supposedly destroyed the entire Red Ribbon Army singlehandedly, a kid who matched the description of Muten Roshi's student who'd appeared at and nearly won the last Tenkaichi Budokai. If it was the same kid, there was a chance that he could do the same to them even if he were injured. There had been several reports that the kid had died last year that had needed to be corrected minutes, hours, and sometimes days later when the kid came back and near-effortlessly kicked the ass of some general who'd spent more time in the army than that kid had been alive.

So far, the kid had been rather compliant, and had only eaten all of their food which they would be charging Capsule Corp extra for in reimbursement. Because the kid had been compliant, the mission had gone without a hitch so far. That could change in a heartbeat however, especially since the kid's father was out doing only the Gods knew what, and could return home at any minute to find his son gone and come looking for him.

They hadn't found any trackers on the kid but that didn't mean there were none, and considering the fact that the man they'd been told to avoid at all costs had flown off without any visible means of propulsion, odds were that they wouldn't find one using Capsule Corp technology. The man who was more than likely the boy's father considering the resemblance was either a much better scientist than Dr. Briefs and his staff, or he was capable of using arcane arts that were thought lost to the ages. In a world inhabited by demons and creatures of the night as well as talking animals and who knew what else, either option was equally viable even though the people who lived in the cities tended to dismiss magic as baseless superstition.

He'd been country raised and had seen enough things in the places that were well away from "civilization" to know that magic was real, and that it could very well be a serious concern in his near future, either from the kid who'd turned into a giant ape in front of the cameras at the most recent Tenkaichi Budokai or from the scarred man who was likely the kid's father, and here, in this relatively small jet that was winging its way to Capsule Corp, he didn't have any of the items he'd learned from his elderly grandmother were necessary for protecting one from supernatural evils and turning magic against its caster. Because he didn't have them, he was starting to feel completely naked despite the fact that his city-bred partners repeatedly told him there was nothing to worry about as they scoffed at his "superstitious" behavior.

The sooner they were rid of the boy, the happier he'd be. He'd throw the boy out of the plane right now if the possible consequences of doing so weren't much worse than riding this trip out and handing the child over to his customers. Right now, the worst that could happen to him is that he could die. If his chucking the child out of the plane killed the kid, and the man he had helped take the child away from turned out to be a master of the arcane as he suspected he was, what came after he died could make hell seem like a pleasant vacation.


End file.
